“Measles is out of sight and out of mind, so we think it’s no big deal, as Bill Shine’s wife has said,” said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Offit was referring to comments last month by Darla Shine, wife of the White House communications chief, who tweeted that she wished her children had had measles like she did as a girl.

“Bring back our #ChildhoodDiseases they keep you healthy,” she wrote.

Offit, a professor of pediatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, thinks Shine might change her mind if she’d seen the children he cared for in 1991 during a measles outbreak in Philadelphia.

“They were absolutely miserable,” he remembers. “And occasionally, they were dead.” “They were absolutely miserable. And occasionally, they were dead.”

Nine children died in that outbreak, according to the Philadelphia Department of Public Health.

Offit can’t understand why Shine and other anti-vaxers would prefer dead children over vaccinated children.

“When Darla Shine talks about how great it was that she had measles as a child, what she forgets to mention is that she gets to tell her story because she’s alive. The ones who died – we don’t hear from them,” he said.

A near miss

Nerius remembers the scariest part of his bout with measles.

He contracted the disease in May 2016, at his sister’s graduation from that Northern Illinois University College of Business. The Illinois Department of Health later determined that a guest who had traveled to the graduation from outside the United States had the measles, which is highly contagious.

“I didn’t interact with anyone at that graduation besides my own family, so it was literally just me walking by someone,” he said.

He says the scariest part is that the day after his sister’s graduation, before he knew that he’d been infected, he attended a technology convention in Las Vegas with thousands of other people.

“I was shaking hands with hundreds of people a day. I wasn’t contagious yet, but it’s sobering to think if the timing had been just slightly different, how many people I could have infected,” he said.

Nerius doesn’t blame his parents for not vaccinating him. He says they were believers in alternative medicine, and in the 1980s, there was no Internet where they could double-check what they were being told by anti-vaxers.

But today’s parents have no excuse, he says. They can go to the American Academy of Pediatrics or a multitude of other sites to learn that vaccines are safe and keep children healthy.

“The science on this has been settled. It’s been solved. When I look at where we are today, with people who are willfully deciding to ignore the facts, it really frustrates me,” Nerius said. “I just don’t understand the mindset of people who want to spread fear.”

4 comments

Truth

Dwayne Polidori

Everybody gets the measles children get the measles vaccinated or not stop spreading bullshit propaganda if you didn’t get the measles when he was a child that he gets him when he’s an adult is just more dangerous.

Fish

Justin Case

Unless this guy is living under his parent’s control at the age of 30, he has had plenty of time to research and get vaccinated. So he can stop blaming his parents and own up to the fact he chose to not be vaccinated as an Adult…which can be done.